Celly Cel

Sandwiched between the mid-'90s Bay Area hip-hop gravy years and the subsequent decade spent wandering in the dessert of rap obscurity, rapper Celly Cel is oftentimes unfairly overlooked. He has a strong and forceful delivery and lyrics that are prototypical slacker gangsta: too baked to be truly menacing, yet too threatening to be innocuous. Weed plays heavily into the equation, as nearly every song references the chronic, dank and/or blunts. The production is slow and funky, stuttering G-Funk that references Bay Area pioneers such as Ant Banks as much as it does Dr. Dre.